AI and the future of conversation

What could someone do with five billion minutes?

They could watch about 42 million movies.

Or they could do what Dialpad has done, and use AI to analyze more than 5 billion minutes of dialogue involving sales calls, customer support, and other business conversations.

It’s an incredible amount of analysis. And it keeps getting better.?

With the recent launch of DialpadGPT—a sophisticated AI model trained on this massive repository of business dialogue—Dialpad will extract more information and insights than ever before.

Together with Dialpad’s steadily expanding suite of AI solutions, DialpadGPT is unlocking a deep understanding of human interactions throughout the business world.

But why stop there??

If AI can demystify our business conversations, what could it do for the countless and often difficult conversations we have elsewhere?

Think about all those deadlocked discussions between management and unions. The incredibly complicated trade talks involving dozens of countries.?

A hostage negotiation??

If AI can improve interactions between companies and their customers, what could it do for teachers and their students? For doctors and their patients?

An AI negotiator

Consider what AI is doing for Walmart, a company that has more than 100,000 suppliers.?

That’s far too many to meet with personally so about 20,000 of them are governed by boilerplate contracts.?

Walmart decided to try something new. It turned to AI and used a chatbot to negotiate directly with 89 suppliers. The chatbot sealed deals with 64% of them while cutting costs by 1.5%.

When Walmart expanded the chatbot to three more countries, the rate of closed deals rose to 68% and cost savings jumped to 3%.

New tool for school

Then there’s the classroom. A recent study used AI to discover why some students become successful and why others don’t.?

They found that a key predictor of future success was a willingness to engage in off-topic conversations.

Sounds like a useful data point for a teacher.?

Perhaps more useful than an end-of-year final exam that identifies problems but comes too late to fix those problems.

Dr. AI

Some of our most difficult conversations are with doctors. So (you guessed it) we’re turning to AI here as well.?

UC San Diego Health is using an AI-powered chatbot alongside a team of human doctors.

The AI crafts replies to patient inquiries about prescriptions and test results, which are then reviewed by a doctor before being sent back to the patient.

And just as DialpadGPT is trained on carefully vetted business communications, this healthcare AI is trained on select datasets to ensure responses are accurate and up to date.

How is AI doing in healthcare?

UC San Diego Health looked at how doctors replied to 195 random healthcare questions on sites like Reddit. It then fed those same questions to a chatbot and asked medical professionals to compare the responses.

The chatbot’s replies were judged better more than 78% of the time. And not just for the quality of the information, but for empathy as well.

These are still early days for AI.?

But the impressive results Dialpad has had with business conversations point to a very promising future elsewhere as well.

If you love the promise of AI as much as we do, keep watching this space for more—as we track the snowballing success of AI and how it continues to make our world a better place to work and live.